SIGNS OF CHANGE – Scott Brown opens his Cape campaign headquarters in Hyannis last November. By January, his signs would be appearing on businesses up and down Main Street.

They say you can’t take it with you, but maybe Ted Kennedy did.

The special brand of progressive politics practiced for more than 40 years by the late Hyannisport senator convinced many that our Commonwealth was a bastion of liberalism. Has Scott Brown tossed that notion in his pickup and taken it to the dump, or was it never true?

Most likely, it’s just that we’re a contrary bunch. We’re not the largest state in the Union, or the most populous, or the richest, but we have the knack of getting the rest of the country to talk about us.

It used to be people talked about us because we were so conservative. H.L. Mencken came to Boston to buy a copy of his American Mercury magazine to force a court test of a ban imposed because an issue carried a story on prostitution. The left decried the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and in the 1970s the pugnacious face of school busing foe Louise Day Hicks meant Massachusetts for many.

As for that liberal image? Well, in addition to standing by Ted Kennedy, we did elect the first African American senator since Reconstruction, and the second African American governor. We were the only state to vote for George McGovern over Richard Nixon.

Face it: we love standing out from the crowd. We even have our own near-universal health care plan, and we got the rest of the county to help pay for the Big Dig, described as the largest public works project since the Pyramids.

So maybe, when it came time to vote for a bland successor to the high-profile Kennedy, or for a “nuclear option” Republican whose impact, at least for a moment, would equal Kennedy’s, we opted to keep the spotlight on ourselves a little longer.

This is not to discount the real allegiances and grievances that were in play on Jan. 19. Luc Poyant of West Hyannisport had it right when he told The Wall Street Journal that he saw a vote for Brown as a way to end the Democratic party’s hold on the state. In a way, this election was as much about dissatisfaction with a sometimes heedless Beacon Hill as it was with a supposedly nanny-minded Capitol Hill.

For the time, the Massachusetts GOP is the Mouse that Roared. Attention will be paid, but eventually, someone will have to pay the piper. Voters here and elsewhere will be the ones to write those checks, seeking balance in today’s teeter-totter politics.

EFM

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